Tuesday, February 5, 2013

UTF8 Support

Text Files will now work with UTF with (many/most) Diff
Tools. This basically comes down to making everything UTF8, and including the
bom (byte order mark) header in the text files.

**Backwards compatibility break**

This change means
version22 of ApprovalTests will break compatibility with previous versions.

To adjust for this,
when you run your tests, ApprovalTests will check the .approved file and add
the UTF8 bom if needed. This might result in you needing to re-check-in your
approved file, despite an apparent lack of change.

GitHub

While not strictly a feature of v.22, this version marks the
move of the source to GitHub. (https://github.com/approvals/ApprovalTests.Net/)
This should make it easier for people to branch and play around with the code.
Although my preferred method of collaboration is still a remote pair
programming session via skype. If you are interesting in pairing just ping me
on twitter @LlewellynFalco

Async

XUnit supports testing of methods using the async and await
keywords. Now ApprovalTests supports it as well. Asynchronous parallel
programming offers many advantages with both IO and multicore, and it’s great
to see this paradigm opening up so nicely in the .net world.

P4Merge and better path finding

It’s always been a source of problems detecting where
different systems have placed the Diff Reporter programs ApprovalTests
uses. Thanks to the addition of
“where.exe” on windows7 and above, if the reporter is in your system path, it
will now be found. This comes with the addition of P4Merge in the reporter
options. P4Merge will also diff images giving us yet another excellent option.

CLS complaint

This is not the same as a portable library (that’s also on
the list) but it does help with language portability. Meaning if you are using
.Net but not using C#, ApprovalTests is looking out for you.

Contributors

A big thanks to everyone who contributed! I could not have
done a ¼ of what I have if it wasn’t for the people who have paired with me
(They have also allowed 2 new ports of ApprovalTests in the last iteration as
well to Node.js & Perl).

ApprovalTests has always relied on the pairing of contributors,
and I was remiss for not being more vocal about it in the past. Thanks again
for all your help.